A Public Nuisance
The mass arrests of peaceful protesters ahead of the coronation should raise the alarm about this Government's growing threats to our democratic freedoms
Democracy can be a nuisance. Elections are expensive, disruptive and unpredictable. If you’re in a position of power and have to periodically justify yourself to millions of people with competing and capricious interests then it can rankle, frustrate and even anger.
Yet we persist with democracy, not despite of these annoyances, but specifically because of them. The fact that we are allowed to annoy our leaders is not a bug, but a defining feature of any free governing system. If we are free to annoy our leaders then we are also free to hold them to account, pressure them to change course and ultimately remove them from office. If we start to lose those freedoms then we start to lose the very basis of our democracy altogether.
It is for this reason that the recent restrictions to our rights to protest, which were so vividly demonstrated over the past weekend, are so worrying.
In the run up to the coronation dozens of people were detained and arrested, under the pretext of supposedly ‘conspiring to commit a public nuisance.’ These included republican protesters, who were arrested while unloading placards for a peaceful protest that had long been pre-agreed with the Metropolitan police, as well as nighttime volunteers who hand out rape alarms to women and at least one journalist filming the arrests.
These clear restrictions on the right to protest have been some time coming. Last year the offence of ‘conspiring to commit a public nuisance’ was made a statutory for the first time by then then Home Secretary Priti Patel. Under the legislation individuals could be arrested and charged if police judged them to be, among other things, at risk of causing 'serious annoyance’ or ‘serious inconvenience' to the public.
As many legal experts and human rights groups have pointed out, this is an incredibly broad and alarming restriction. Last year the Joint Committee on Human Rights warned that they were ‘seriously concerned’ that it could be ‘used to criminalise non-violent protest’ that would otherwise be protected under international human rights law.
That is exactly what now appears to have happened. As the criminal barrister Chris Daw said of the arrests over the weekend, this legislation appears to have been specifically designed “not to make it easier for police to deal with criminal behaviour, [but] to make it easier for people to be arrested without committing any crime at all.”
This is not only the criminalisation of peaceful protest, but it is the criminalisation of such protest before it even takes place. Under this law anyone ‘conspiring’ to exercise their long-held right to take part in a peaceful protest will be at risk not just of committing a crime while in the act of protesting, but of committing a ‘pre-crime’ before the protest has even begun.
The Metropolitan Police’s justification for their actions following the arrests over the weekends was to say that they had to be judged in the ‘context’ of a once in a generation occasion enjoyed by thousands of people.
Yet human rights are not contextual. You either have them or you don’t, and the evidence from the past few days is that we do not.
Protest, like other democratic freedoms such as the right to strike, can be annoying. It can disrupt, it can anger, it can frustrate. Yet a democracy without the right to either peacefully protest, withhold our Labour, or vote without hindrance, is no real democracy at all.
Democratic freedoms may sometimes be a nuisance to people in positions of power, but they are the price we pay to live in a free society.
And as other nations have found out in the past, the price for losing those freedoms altogether is far greater.
One feature of arrest is that people are removed from the streets for hours.
The next day they are told that they won’t be charged. So that’s alright say the media.
Yet it means people have had the right to protest denied at the moment it may be most effective.
As an anti-protest measure it is effective. The cooperation of the police with the objective of one party.
Republic say they cooperated with the police to make sure they (the police) were aware of what they were going to do.
Surely the lesson to other people is don’t tell the police. The risk of arrest is less.